designism

The Art Directors Club hosted Designism 4.0 this Wednesday night in their New York City gallery. This was the fourth annual event on design and social change there, and after last year’s ambitious program was cut short by the Vice-Presidential debate this year’s program was significantly streamlined — four slideshows, a roundtable, and one big question: how to do good work and still eat.

On September 21, 2006 the Art Director’s Club convened a panel discussion on design and social change. They dubbed it “Designism.”

When I first heard about it, I was not optimistic. I’ve been disappointed before by how professional associations have addressed social design, and the MP3 sat on my desktop for a long, long time. After all, how radical could a professional association actually be when its bread-and-butter is mammon itself?

But after finally listening, I was very nicely surprised. The talk covered a nice, broad range of approaches to design for social change: from Milton Glaser’s big-table, middle-of-the-road approach to Jessica Helfland’s quiet collaborative engagement to James Victore’s more autonomous guerilla style.

But the best surprise of all was George Lois. I’d always loved his work. Those big, provocative Esquire covers are truly classic. But it was a special treat to learn of the progressive motivation behind them, that the man himself was an foul-mouthed, outspoken leftist — and a veteran to boot.